Abstract

Today, power demand grows rapidly and expansion in transmission and generation is restricted with the limited availability of resources and the strict environmental constraints. Consequently, power systems are today much more loaded than before. In addition, interconnection between remotely located power systems turned out to be a common practice. These give rise to low frequency oscillations in the range of 0.1-3.0 Hz. If not well damped, these oscillations may keep growing in magnitude until loss of synchronism results. Power system stabilizers (PSSs) have been used in the last few decades to serve the purpose of enhancing power system damping to low frequency oscillations. PSSs have proved to be efficient in performing their assigned tasks. The objective of this chapter is to investigate the potential of particle swarm optimization as a tool in designing UPFC-based stabilizers to improve power system transient stability. To estimate the controllability of each of the UPFC control signals on the electromechanical modes, singular value decomposition is employed. The problem of designing all the UPFCbased stabilizers individually is formulated as an optimization problem. Particle swarm optimizer is utilized to search for the optimum stabilizer parameter settings that optimize a given objective function. Coordinated design of the different stabilizers is also carried out by finding the best parameter settings for more than one stabilizer at a given operating condition in a coordinated manner.